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Like many others, I suffer a bit from anxiety, but it is mostly situational. Meeting new people, starting a new job, going to a new place, etc. Recently with the change in my employment status (as of tomorrow) it has brought a lot of uncertainty and anxiety. One coping method that I have found to work for me is to focus this nervous energy into something positive and rearrange something or organize something. For me, a sense of order goes a long way and makes me feel like I am just a little more in control of the situation, not to mention it helps alleviate some of the stress of something out of order. I find that when I have a messy desk, or clothes on the floor, or a messy inbox that it does nothing but add more stress to my current load. Sure all of these are trivial in the grand scheme of things, but when compounded with other situations, sometimes it is enough to really put you in a foul mood.

With that said, I am no clean/neat freak. My bed is never made, there is always at least one item of clothing on the floor and a stack of receipts on my desk. I do however tend to keep certain things in order all of the time and one of those items is my case of body jewelry. Some girls buy shoes or purses or regular jewelry, personally, I buy body jewelry. Aside from the 3 rings that I always wear, my body jewelry is really the only thing that I never take off (with the exception of places like work, etc. when needed) Previously working for a company that sold body jewelry has allowed me to amass quite the collection.

My collection consists of my jewelry divided by type in little jars that fit into a container meant for beads. I think I picked this up at Walmart or Michaels or something for a pretty low cost. This would also be a great idea for people who own a lot of rings and would like to keep them organized and visible. I find that this is the easiest way for me to have all of my jewelry in one place and see everything at a glance for those days where everything MUST match. Also not pictured that I keep with my collection are a pair of nitrile gloves that I use to loosen or tighten jewelry and a small bottle of tea tree oil used for cleaning.

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December NaBloPoMo Topic:

How hard do you think you work?

Early on in my working career, I established a personal goal to always put as much of myself into my work as I can. This sometimes can be a fault, due to the fact that I will agonize over something that is not worth it, solely because of the high standards I hold myself to. I also learned early on that you are at work to work, that’s why it’s called… WORK. Sure I will have a casual conversation with a coworker, or take a moment to look at a funny picture or video. I think all of these things are important and make more productive people, but you will never catch me with my stuff in my hands, jacket on, waiting for the time clock to tick over. When I was in HR this was one of my biggest pet peeves as the time clock was right in front of my desk. How does someone justify being paid for the 10 minutes they stand there waiting for the end of their shift? Of course you wouldn’t want to start a new project to turn around and call it quits for the day, but there is always something that can be done that can occupy the last few minutes of your time. The same could be said for the first 10 minutes of your day. If I want to make a cup of hot chocolate or a bowl of oatmeal, I will arrive early to do so.

Depending on my workload, I will usually go above and beyond when it comes to tasks, mostly to satisfy myself. Sure I could just write out that quick list that the boss wanted throw it on his desk, but if I know that I don’t have other urgent items needing my attention, nicely formatting the list in Word and taking that extra second to do usually goes a long way. For example, at my current job, I deal a lot with equipment lists for various locations. Sure it is easy enough to have one big list for each location and look through all of it when I need to find an answer for either a technician or client, but in my down time I have managed to break these lists out by building location (ie. Building A has 1,2,3, & 4, Building B has 5, 6, & 7, etc.) I like to think that by working a little harder right now, I am saving myself hard work later. Instead of searching through one giant list looking for an answer, I can now quickly find it. Work smarter. Not harder. Probably one of the best things I strive to do everyday.

For Thanksgiving I headed 2.5 hours north to visit my Mom & Dad. When you’re away from a small town for a while, you sometimes forget what it’s like when you don’t exactly look the status quo. I personally think that I’m looking rather tame these days, comparatively speaking, my hair is black, it’s cold so the majority of my tattoos are covered, and I even have pink nails!

But in a small town, even the smallest differences stick out like a sore thumb. Yesterday due to the frenzy of Black Friday, I went relatively unnoticed in the small town of Wrangler wearing, camo covered, shotgun toting folk. My dad asked me if I would be interested in going to lunch with him today and I agreed. I arrived before him at the diner and nothing like the entire room turning to look at you as you are being seated. It was really awkward and slightly maddening. It’s 2012 people. Women can vote, we have a black president, and tattoos and piercing are more common than ever. I couldn’t help but feel the entire room judging me without even hearing a word out of my mouth. Even now, as I tap away this blog on my phone, still waiting for my Dad, I can feel the people sitting around me staring at me. It’s weird.

Sometimes I really miss living in a small town. You constantly run into people you know, there is no such thing as traffic, and the days seem to go by just a little bit slower. But when situations like this happen, it makes me long to be back in the booming city where I am just another face on the street.

I hope everyone had a fantastic Thanksgiving. I personally ate so much I feel like I am set for a while calorie-wise.

Tomorrow I am taking engagement pictures for my friends Shawn and Anna and I am exceptionally nervous. I did a super deep cleaning for the first time since I’ve had this camera (about 10 years, yikes!) so hopefully I wracked up some good camera karma and capture a little magic tomorrow.

1. Waiting for my nails to dry. I am seriously the most impatient person when it comes to this task.

2. Hamming it up before heading out to the Call of Duty : Black Ops II midnight release. I’m wearing a tank top, I promise.

3. An envelope I doodled up before sending off to my best of friends.

4. The dogs at work – Jack making a lovely cameo in this cute picture of Tenny.

5. Tried something new with my nails by adding half of another color ontop instead of doing a standard french tip.

6. A lovely sunset shot from my drive home from work.

7. And another – seriously the sky was making this too easy.

8. Hanging out at work – doing… work things.

9. I hit the mall in an attempt to find some clothing items that I could add to my barebones collection of t-shirts and jeans. This top from H&M was not flattering in the slightest.

10. A little flashback Friday on Instagram. This picture is from Halloween 2007 – the one and only time I have applied make up in my adult life.

11. Another flashback to 2009. Love those braces!

12. Arein is exactly how you spell my name, if it weren’t already spelled Erin.

13. Lunch by myself on Saturday. I often try to find window seats so I can just gaze out, and this was a perfect little spot to watch the rain fall.

14. Butter noodles and a bowl of tomato soup from Noodles & Co.

15. I spotted this leaf on the way back out to my car after lunch. I was going to pass it up, but I immediately turned around after putting my bag in the car to snap a picture of it. It was just too pretty to go unnoticed.

I do apologize for my lack of posting lately. I received some news on Friday that I am not currently at liberty to talk about, and it has got me quite down. Hopefully something good will come of all of it, somehow, but for now – I’m just trying to keep my head up.

On Tuesday, Richard and I went to the midnight release for Call of Duty – Black Ops II. I feel like this was complete deja vu as I was standing in a frigid line just last week for Halo 4. The line was considerably longer for Black Ops II than Halo 4, mostly because the demographic is a bit different for the game. We have kind of created a ritual for our midnight release habits. First we head over to GameStop and finalize receipts, then head over to In-N-Out burger for delicious burgers. I seriously feel bad for anyone who does not have an In-N-Out near them. This time we decided to also stop at Krispy Kreme because our arteries did not take a big enough beating and picked up a couple of donuts.

Richards custard filled donut looked rather derpy if you ask me. All of this ended up taking way less time than we expected it to, and we had no intentions of standing in line any longer than we had to because of how cold it was. The GameStop we were at shares the same parking lot with the Target that I used to work for, which was also doing a midnight release, so we wandered over there to get out of the cold and see a couple of friends. When we got there at around 11, the line was a whole 4 people deep vs the 100+ people outside of GameStop. I think these people had the right idea. I did some Christmas shopping while there (my goal is to have everything done by the end of the month and put nothing on credit cards) and we finally headed back over to GameStop to stand in the obnoxiously long line.

By the time we returned the line had grown from the side of the building almost looping the entire building. We had to stand out back in the boonies and rosemary (seriously rosemary plants everywhere!) but luckily we were only in line for about 10 minutes as the line moved really quickly. I am always saddened by how much trash people leave when hanging out for midnight releases or Black Friday – is it really too hard to pick up your garbage and throw it away 2 feet from you? It is not fair to either the employees that have to pick it up, the customers that have to navigate around it, and the other businesses in the shopping center that now have a bunch of garbage in front of their doors come 10 am. We were in and out in within minutes and back home to check out the game. Unfortunately I completely passed out before I even got to see a minute of the game play, woops.

So far I have only played the Zombie mode and its okay. I find the lack of readily available guns in some levels to be exceptionally frustrating as well as the introduction of fire. There are cracks in the ground in some levels and while I understand that if visible flames are coming from the cracks then yes, I will catch fire if I do not jump over them, but I should not catch fire if I am simply stepping over one of the cracks that does not have visible flames. Are you trying to tell me that I can not step over a crack in the ground? Stupid. As for Halo 4, we beat the campaign in 1 day and sadly have to replay through it on my Xbox so that I can get the achievements as well. Oh well.